Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Julian Assange Granted Bail

We are all Julian Assange
But the Swedish prosecutors promptly appealed the decision, meaning that he spends at least another 48 hours in custody, which in his case means rather harsh isolation.

On the other hand, it appears that reports of a grand jury investigating an indictment under the 1917 espionage act may be baseless.

Truth be told, a good prosecutor can find an sitting already sitting grand jury, and Mr. Assange from a legal perspective is certainly a ham sandwich.

Were I a prosecutor, I would not begin any process until Assange were in Sweden, where extraditions appears to be more likely than in the UK.

Of course, while this is going on, the internet is still being roiled by attacks on both sides of the issue, with Anonymous emerging from 4chan to hit the financial and IT companies that cut Wikileaks off, and other hackers going after Wikileaks, in a game of dueling DDOS attacks.

Hanging over all this is Assange's poison pill file, which has been distributed to tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people, waiting for the decryption key that will be distributed if anything happens to him or Wikileaks by a dozen or so of his colleagues.

And then there is the absurdity that Amazon, after tossing Wikileaks from their servers, is now selling copies of the cables for the Kindles.

In the mean time, here are the crucial government secrets that we now know as a result of the cables:
Of course there is some truly sensitive and shocking information out there, specifically that, the DPRK (North Korea) was willing to take significant steps to  reassure the US and the ROK (South Korea) in exchange for an Eric Clapton concert in Pyongyang.

Merciful heavens, we can't let the citizenry know about that.

The final word on this is Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg's, "EVERY attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time."

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